ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses general concepts from the information processing view of psychology, and indicates how they might be used in the study of individual differences. It describes a more general model of human cognition, which includes perception, memory, and problem solving. The chapter considers some situations in which the Atkinson and Shiffrin model has been used to study individual differences in the capacity to retain information for several minutes. It also shows several studies based upon proposal for a model of memory. Short-term memory (STM) contains the listener's recollection of the speaker's last few words; intermediate-term memory (ITM) contains the listener's understanding of what the speech is about. The model also contains a long-term memory (LTM) component that is of conceptually infinite capacity. Many psychologists have seen individual differences as sources of error variance to be eliminated through the use of efficient experimental designs. The ultimate goal of psychology is to understand and predict the behavior of the individual subject.
